LOREN T. ROBINSON v. JEFFREY WOODS, Warden
No. 16-2067
United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
August 24, 2018
RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b). File Name: 18a0188p.06. Argued: June 7, 2018.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Before: BOGGS and GRIFFIN, Circuit Judges; HOOD, District Judge.*
COUNSEL
ARGUED: Kristin Cope, BAKER BOTTS, L.L.P., Dallas, Texas, for Appellant. Linus Banghart-Linn, OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MICHIGAN, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Kristin Cope, BAKER BOTTS, L.L.P., Dallas, Texas, for Appellant. Linus Banghart-Linn, OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MICHIGAN, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellee.
OPINION
GRIFFIN, Circuit Judge.
The Supreme Court has interpreted the Sixth Amendment‘s jury guarantee to mean that “[a]ny fact that, by law, increases the penalty for a crime . . . must be submitted to the jury and found beyond a reasonable doubt.” Alleyne v. United States, 570 U.S. 99, 103 (2013). In this appeal, petitioner Loren Robinson seeks a writ of habeas corpus under
I.
Petitioner and two of his cohorts sold the victim a large amount of crack cocaine on credit, beat the victim when he was unable to repay petitioner, and, eventually, extorted from the victim‘s parents the roughly $1,000 petitioner felt he was owed for the drugs. As a result, a Michigan jury convicted petitioner of extortion,
As is standard in Michigan criminal practice, the Michigan Department of Corrections prepared, and the trial court considered, a “Presentence Investigation Report” (PSIR) in conjunction with petitioner‘s sentencing. See, e.g., People v. Harper, 739 N.W.2d 523, 548 n.72 (Mich. 2007) (“Michigan courts have long held that a sentencing court may presume that unchallenged facts contained in a PSIR are accurate.“).1 In general, the Department sets guidelines ranges by scoring offense and offender variables,
The PSIR provided the following sentencing guidelines ranges for the minimum sentence of each conviction: between 84 and 175 months for the extortion conviction (with a 30-year-maximum sentence), between 19 and 38 months for the delivery-of-a-controlled-substance conviction (with a 40-year-maximum sentence), between 50 and 125 months for the unlawful-imprisonment conviction (with a 22-years-and-6-months-maximum sentence), and no recommended range for the aggravated-assault conviction (which comes with a one-year-maximum sentence). The Department recommended that the court give petitioner a minimum sentence near the bottom of each range. At the time of petitioner‘s sentencing, the ranges were mandatory, allowing a trial judge to “depart” from them only with a showing of “substantial and compelling” reasons.
The sentencing judge reviewed and accepted the recommended scores for the guidelines variables but disagreed with the Department‘s “low end” recommendation. Instead, he sentenced petitioner to a minimum of 150 months to a maximum of 30 years for the extortion conviction, 38 months to 40 years for the delivery-of-a-controlled-substance conviction, 10 years to 22 years and 6 months for the unlawful-imprisonment conviction, and one year for the aggravated-assault conviction, all to be served concurrently.
The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions and sentences. Robinson, 2013 WL 3942387, at *1. Petitioner argued, in relevant part, that the sentence violated his Sixth Amendment rights because it was based on judge-found facts. Id. at *5. On that issue, the court held:
Defendant claims that the trial court improperly scored the offense variables because the facts used to support the scoring of them were not found beyond a reasonable doubt by the jury, contrary to the holding of Blakely v. Washington, [542 U.S. 296] (2004). However, our Supreme Court has definitively held that Blakely does not apply to Michigan‘s indeterminate sentencing scheme. People v. Drohan, [715 N.W.2d 778, 791-92] ([Mich.] 2006). We are required to follow the decisions of the Supreme Court. People v. Strickland, [810 N.W.2d 660, 665] ([Mich. Ct. App.] 2011). Accordingly, defendant‘s argument is without merit.
Id. This brief discussion failed to address whether the United States Supreme Court‘s then-recent opinion in Alleyne, 570 U.S. 99 (issued roughly a month and a half prior), affected the court‘s analysis. Petitioner then filed an application for leave to appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court, which denied leave in a boilerplate order. People v. Robinson, 840 N.W.2d 352 (Mich. 2013) (order).
Robinson filed a timely habeas petition under
II.
“In an appeal from the denial of habeas relief, we review the district court‘s legal conclusions de novo and its factual findings for clear error.” Scott v. Houk, 760 F.3d 497, 503 (6th Cir. 2014) (citation omitted). Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a state conviction may be overturned for an issue adjudicated on the merits in state court if the decision “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.”
III.
Petitioner challenges his sentence as violative of the Sixth Amendment. Because we hold that Alleyne clearly established the unconstitutionality of Michigan‘s mandatory sentencing regime, we reverse the district court and conditionally grant petitioner habeas relief, limited to his sentence.
A.
As an initial matter, the district court erred in its analysis of petitioner‘s Sixth Amendment claim. The court held that the claim was meritless because, under Harris v. United States, 536 U.S. 545, 566 (2002), the Sixth Amendment prohibited only sentences beyond the statutory maximum that were based on judge-found facts. Robinson, 2016 WL 3256837, at *11. Though the court acknowledged that Alleyne overruled Harris, it reasoned that Harris still controlled because Alleyne did not apply retroactively on collateral review. Id. at *11 n.1.
But the district court failed to appreciate that the Supreme Court issued Alleyne while petitioner‘s direct appeal was pending—Alleyne was decided a little more than a month before the Michigan Court of Appeals issued its opinion in this case.2 And Supreme Court opinions apply
B.
The Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides, in part: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury . . . .”
Over the course of the last 30 years, the Supreme Court has grappled with various components of modern sentencing schemes, to determine whether they complied with the original understanding of the Sixth Amendment. See, e.g., Alleyne, 570 U.S. at 103; Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 490; Jones, 526 U.S. at 248-49; McMillan v. Pennsylvania, 477 U.S. 79 (1986).
In Alleyne, the Court applied, for the first time, its previous conclusions regarding the imposition of penalties beyond the statutory maximum to determinations of mandatory minimum sentences, holding that “any fact that increases the mandatory minimum is an ‘element’ that must be submitted to the jury.” 570 U.S. at 103. Alleyne was a watershed opinion, overruling two prior precedents—Harris, 536 U.S. at 566, and McMillan, 477 U.S. at 93—which had held that the Sixth Amendment allowed increases in mandatory minimum sentences on the basis of judge-found facts.
The question before us is whether Alleyne‘s holding rendered Michigan‘s then-mandatory sentencing regime unconstitutional, such that the Michigan Court of Appeals decision in Robinson‘s case was contrary to clearly established federal law. See Schriro v. Landrigan, 550 U.S. 465, 473 (2007). “A federal habeas court may issue the writ under the ‘contrary to’ clause if the state court applies a rule different from the governing law set forth in our cases, or if it decides a case differently than we have done on a set of materially indistinguishable facts.” Bell v. Cone, 535 U.S. 685, 694 (2002).
In Alleyne, the Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of
This rationale applies equally to Michigan‘s mandatory minimum sentences. At all relevant times, Michigan‘s sentencing regime operated through the use of offense categories,
At bottom, Michigan‘s sentencing regime violated Alleyne‘s prohibition on the use of judge-found facts to increase mandatory minimum sentences. 570 U.S. at 111-12. And, although we are not bound by its decision, we note that the Michigan Supreme Court recently so held in People v. Lockridge, 870 N.W.2d 502, 513-14 (Mich. 2015) (“[A]
number of OVs and PRVs to come to a guidelines range, rather than the slightly more straightforward three-tier scheme addressed in Alleyne, 570 U.S. at 103-04, this distinction does not except the Michigan regime from Alleyne‘s fundamental principles. In sum, Alleyne proscribed exactly that which occurred at petitioner‘s sentencing hearing—the use of “[f]acts that increase the mandatory minimum sentence” that were never submitted to the jury and found beyond a reasonable doubt. 570 U.S. at 108. The Michigan Court of Appeals’ conclusion that Michigan‘s sentencing scheme did not violate the Sixth Amendment was, therefore, “contrary to . . . clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Respondent argues, in part, that the scheme is constitutional because sentences in Michigan are “indeterminate,” in that the sentencing judge sets the minimum sentence using judge-found facts to score a number of OVs and PRVs, while the criminal statute for the particular offense sets the maximum sentence. See
But, as acknowledged by the Michigan Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court has never used the phrase “indeterminate sentencing” in the same manner as the Michigan courts. See Lockridge, 870 N.W.2d at 515-16. Instead, the Supreme Court uses the term “indeterminate” to refer to regimes that “involve judicial factfinding . . . [b]ut [where] the facts do not pertain to whether the defendant has a legal right to a lesser sentence.” Blakely, 542 U.S. at 309; id. at 332 (O‘Connor, J., dissenting) (“Under indeterminate systems, the length of the sentence is entirely or almost entirely within the discretion of the judge or of the parole board, which typically has broad power to decide when to release a prisoner.“). Thus, though before Lockridge the Michigan courts considered their sentencing regime to be “indeterminate” because it produces a sentence with a minimum and a maximum with parole-board discretion in between, it is clear this is not how the Supreme Court uses that term in the Sixth Amendment context.4 Moreover, regardless of how the
Respondent also argues that Alleyne does not implicate Michigan‘s sentencing regime because the minimum sentence in Michigan criminal practice is nothing more than a parole-eligibility date, and the Supreme Court has maintained that there is no constitutional right to parole. See Greenholtz v. Inmates of Neb. Penal & Corr. Complex, 442 U.S. 1, 7 (1979) (“There is no constitutional or inherent right of a convicted person to be conditionally released before the expiration of a valid sentence.“). But this argument misses the mark. While an increase in a Michigan minimum sentence may delay only the date on which a defendant becomes eligible for parole, the lack of a constitutional right to parole is wholly unrelated to the right to have a jury find the facts that “alter the prescribed range of sentences to which a defendant is exposed.” Alleyne, 570 U.S. at 108. This right arises at sentencing, well before parole (or the denial thereof) comes into play. And that is the right addressed in the Apprendi and Alleyne line of cases. See, e.g., id. Accordingly, Alleyne requires us to hold that the Michigan trial court‘s use of judge-found facts to score mandatory sentencing guidelines that resulted in an increase of petitioner‘s minimum sentence violated petitioner‘s Sixth Amendment rights. Id.
IV.
For these reasons, we reverse the judgment of the district court and conditionally grant Robinson‘s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, as it pertains to his Sixth Amendment sentencing claim. We remand this case to the district court with instructions to remand to the state sentencing court for sentencing proceedings consistent with this opinion and the Constitution. The district court shall grant a writ of habeas corpus unless the state initiates, within 180 days, such sentencing proceedings.